For some, bitch is a four-letter word. Cast into the same category as expletives like fuck and shit, bitch has been branded profane, obscene, and indecent. As a tabooed word, it has often been censored or avoided altogether by the mainstream media, to protect tender eyes and ears. In its written form, bitch been expurgated from books and newspapers. In the past, bitch was considered to be defamatory, a dangerous smear on a woman’s character, and leveling the slur at an innocent party could land the offender in court. In its spoken form, bitch has been bleeped in songs and muted in movies, while some radio stations and television networks have been fined for using it. Thanks to the many pioneers pushing the word’s use, bitch has undergone a dramatic “unbleeping” over time. As taboos changed, the word started to be used more openly. Nowadays, bitch is everywhere. This chapter looks at the many bans on bitch and controversies surrounding the word, both past and present.

In 1959, literary critic Warren Tallman published a landmark study of Kerouac’s spontaneous method that focused on The Subterraneans, a novel Kerouac wrote over the course of just three days in 1953. This chapter builds on Tallman’s work (and other subsequent scholarship) to show how Kerouac adopted the use of spontaneity from what he understood to be a jazz aesthetic, purposively repudiating the reigning New Critical norms that dictated “good” fiction must exhibit certain kinds of “unity” and “selectivity” of expression. This chapter therefore takes The Subterraneans as a concentrated case study in how Kerouac composes, rehearses and constructs a Spontaneous Prose text.

Kerouac referred to the Black American as “the essential American” and “the salvation of America,” phrases that, while never adequately explored in Kerouac’s writing, signal at least recognition of the centrality of Black Americans and Black American culture to the broader American society. This chapter explores how consumption of Black culture and Blackness as a catalytic theme weaves throughout Kerouac’s work and is key to his broader aesthetic philosophy. However, this chapter argues that his often superficial readings ignore the reality of Black constraint, subsequently rendering Black life discrepant with the lived experience of Blackness in America. Problematically, his longing is ultimately predicated on Black silence and evasion of Black interiority, and any identification with Blacks is transitory and does not ameliorate his uses of Blackness.

Bernstein was a popular figure, in the conventional sense of garnering attention and admiration from a great many people, but his relationship to popular music was hardly straightforward. Bernstein expressed scepticism about much of popular music from the 1960s on and his personal taste hewed to the musics of his youth, such as swing-era jazz, blues, and the Golden-era of Broadway and popular song, while occasionally expanding to include rock’n’roll. However, Bernstein also viewed popular music as a kind of wellspring that composers could draw from, whether it was Mozart’s Magic Flute or his own West Side Story. Not only could borrowing from popular music revitalize tonal classical music for the twentieth century, as opposed to twelve-tone serialism and other mid-century modernist trends, but Bernstein also firmly believed that popular musics, particularly jazz, were the key to creating a uniquely American musical style.

Between October 1955 and March 1958, Bernstein presented seven television broadcasts on the Omnibus culture series. He addressed topics from Beethoven, Bach, modern music, and opera to musical theatre and jazz and appealed widely to audiences, educating and offering knowledge while avoiding excessively elevated language. Writing the scripts himself, Bernstein effortlessly moved from various roles as a conductor, narrator, pianist, and educator within the context of the show, dazzling audiences with his charismatic personality and stylish attire. The programmes were well received, with an estimated sixteen million viewers tuning in to watch the December 1955 ‘The Art of Conducting’ broadcast. His carefully selected words, analogies, and references were extremely relatable to the middle-class family demographics of the programmes, and the broadcasts fostered Bernstein’s growing pop-star status as he gained international popularity as a conductor and both a Broadway and classical composer.

Few would argue the premise that Leonard Bernstein’s music sounds prototypically American. Most of his works include numerous passages that would only have been written by someone from the United States, especially one active from the 1940s to the 1980s. His frequent cultivation of musical tropes associated with various types of jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley, rock, Latin music, and concert music by the likes of Aaron Copland help make Bernstein’s interest in an American sound perhaps the single most significant factor that defines his musical style. This chapter considers how that style developed in terms of when and how he discovered and incorporated major American musical styles. The musical influences blend with other inspirations from Jewish music and Western concert music to render Bernstein one of the most eclectic composers of his generation.

Although the concert hall was perhaps Bernstein’s first love, musical theatre was always very close to his heart, and this chapter explores his first three works written for the Broadway stage: On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953) and Candide (1956). There is an exploration of the origin and context of each show, and of the collaborative processes behind their development, from the tight team-work of On the Town and Wonderful Town to the personnel problems of Candide. The author considers the wide variety of musical styles utilized by Bernstein, particularly his blending of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ techniques and sounds. There is a discussion of how the stories and libretti of the three shows reflect aspects of the social, historical and political atmosphere of the time, and of the importance and influence of these early works.

Touching down in a few of the many geographies of Black sound, this chapter pauses to listen in between the lines and forms of Black literary creation. Inclusive of readings of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and others, this chapter examines the penetrating collusions of the sonic and/as the literary in order to briefly mark their interreliance and to consider the conditions and futures of blackness as improvisational practice.

The history of American music writing – essays on music, criticism, reviews, pamphlets – is told in this chapter, beginning in the nineteenth century, when an identifiably American music still had not fully coalesced. The early twentieth century saw the arrival of strong music advocates and composer-writers who sought to create innovative music and write prolifically about these new sounds, for which they had become de facto evangelists. Early American music writers underscored the differences between American and European music. Essays on music took on an increasingly pedagogical function, teaching their readers about the intricacies and sometimes hidden features of new compositions. The earliest American music writing focused on classical music, but as jazz entered the scene, with its complex rules and unfamiliar rhythms and chord structures, a new cohort of essayists developed a language for writing about this American artform. Throughout the century, a more personal tone emerged in the music essay as composers, musicians, and music connoisseurs began to articulate their feelings, impressions, memories, and individual experiences.

To speak of institutions is usually to invoke an idea of brick-and-mortar establishments, and the organizations that inhabit and sustain them. However, an institution is as much an idea as it is a thing: the institutionalization of a musical genre is, above all else, the formalization of a narrative about the genre, and of the value system that the narrative embodies. The present chapter touches upon three instances of the institutionalization of jazz in the United States since the Second World War, including the Institute of Jazz Studies, housed at Rutgers University in New Jersey; the SF Jazz Center in San Francisco; and the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at the Berklee College of Music. I seek here to discern what their supporting narratives can tell us about shifting conceptions of jazz institutionalism, and its reflection of broader ideas about the music’s role in American and global musical culture.

While academic reactions to jazz were long dominated by a methodology drawn from musicology, attentive to composition and transcribed solos as forms, scholarship over the past few decades– amid the interdisciplinary shift of “the new jazz studies”– has articulated in ever more assertive terms that “meaning” in jazz depends not only on what is played, but how. This chapter responds to this interdisciplinary shift by thinking through the importance of performance to a comprehensive understanding of jazz expression, and the usefulness of African American studies and performance studies in conceptualizing the various theatrical and gestural vocabularies at work in jazz. Using examples from Thelonious Monk, Wynton Marsalis, and Ornette Coleman, this chapter examines in detail how we might understand jazz not just as music but as an extension of historical Afro-diasporic expressive practice, a construction of individual musical personae, and an ongoing aesthetic response to the persistent malice of white supremacy.

Race has always been a central issue in discussions of jazz. A history of the representation of jazz in the American cinema is, in many ways, a history of the representation of African Americans, including their struggle to overcome oppression from whites. But as the title of this paper suggests, jazz is one of several aspects of American culture which has delighted white people and inspired them to appropriate– or to steal– the music of Black people. Many of the early jazz films were built around the white swing orchestras and their followers. In the 1940s and 1950s, biopics told the stories of white jazz artists. Biopics of black artists appeared in the 1960s and later. More recently, jazz has been celebrated as an art that allows musicians and audiences to ascend to a higher plane.

By the end of the nineteenth century, cakewalk and ragtime music had taken the world so much by storm that Europe’s major classical composers were composing ragtime and cakewalk inspired music. Both Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy sought to break from European classical traditions by investing in the African American vernacular forms that were introducing the Old World to New World rhythmic patterns and melodies. This interest in performance, nightlife, the circus, and café culture was shared by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Charles Demuth, and George Grosz, all of whom explored themes and aesthetics influenced by the confluence of African American performance culture and African art available in the Western cultural capitals of Paris, New York, and Berlin. By the time author F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s “the jazz age” in the United States, African American music had already been influencing the trajectory of visual culture in the United States for several decades. With its creative fluidity, investment in aesthetics, and ability to mine African diasporic cultures for its most innovative impulses, jazz has been poised to respond to visual culture’s search for new vocabularies of form.

This chapter explores the role of intertextuality in jazz. I argue that major variants of intertextuality– in particular, post-structuralism and Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”– miss what is most important to jazz: the way jazz has served as a vehicle for both the transmission of tradition and a dialogue within it and with other genres. I suggest that Bakhtin’s dialogism illuminates those neglected intertextual features and show how jazz musicians intertextually “re-accent” or “signify” in their use of quotations, licks, style, and repertory. Players quote, use licks, affirm and cross genre boundaries, and improvise over standards in order both to contribute to a tradition and alter it by expressing their individuality. In Jason Moran’s recent work engaging with Thelonious Monk and Fats Waller, he uses stylistic, generic, and repertory-based intertextuality to make the case for jazz as a far reaching but ultimately unified continuum. He thus connects with a larger tradition, but at the same time through recontextualization and re-accenting uses those utterances for self-expression and pushes against cultural– and, by implication, social and political– boundaries. Thus intertextual jazz performances simultaneously express the musicians themselves and engage with the larger whole(s) of which they are a part.

This introduction establishes the wide variety of cultural and historical contexts that Jazz and American Culture covers by revisiting five moments across the past century. Beginning with the first recording by a Black woman in 1920 and moving to the pandemic summer of 2020, these five vignettes present us not with a straight line through American history but instead offer a series of nodes that suggest the complicated ways jazz has been entangled with American politics, aesthetic upheavals, technological and economic changes, and the lived experience of the everyday. Most importantly, these select moments across the history of jazz and American culture– spanning Jim Crow to George Floyd– remind us how the music’s development out of African American expressive culture is key to understanding both its ongoing response to the violence of American racism and its incisive critique of American democracy’s failures.

Since the 1920s, American writers have evinced a fascination with and investment in fictional representations of jazz music and jazz musicians. As this essay demonstrates, part of jazz’s appeal for fiction writers is that it offers the opportunity to explore various kinds of border crossing. This essay surveys several jazz fictions to explicate how these fictions portray jazz as a local event, often focusing on musicians who may not be known beyond their own communities, but who live to play the music. Using Nathaniel Mackey’s concept of artistic othering, this essay investigates how writers portray the jazz musician’s search for a space to belong, where artistic forms of risk-taking are affirmed and the contingencies jazz musicians face, whether it be in the form of substance abuse, underemployment, self-doubt, or social injustice can be managed through instances where self-repair, improvisation, and community constitute the foundations of the musician’s lifeworld. Jazz fiction, in other words, is deeply concerned with the contradictions of American life and how playing jazz music involves the act of containing contradictions.

The American Songbook has been a fruitful source of improvisation for jazz musicians, either through artists interpreting those songs themselves, or crafting new songs from their chord changes as bebop musicians did prolifically in the 1940s. This chapter investigates this influence, beginning with the debt that jazz improvisers owe to Tin Pan Alley composers, before turning that relationship around to consider how the success of those same songwriters depended on an ongoing attempt to identify what made jazz appealing to American listeners and distil aspects of that enigmatic essence into the commercially viable object of popular song. In examples like Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather,” Irving Berlin’s “Putting on the Ritz,” or any number of Cole Porter compositions, we see the workmanlike creators of Tin Pan Alley incorporating not just musical elements associated with jazz, but also a more general “sensibility,” intended to recreate the music’s blues-informed world-weariness or performative impertinence.

Scat and vocalese are two approaches to jazz vocality. This essay intervenes into dominant narratives of their history, value, and functions and encourages us to conceptualize a broader, contradictory view of what they have been and done. This view both acknowledges the narrative of Louis Armstrong giving birth to scat in 1926 and that scat was widespread far earlier; it points to how scat has occupied both sides of Lindon Barrett’s binary of the singing/signing voice, variously functioning as institutionalized vocality that claims authority by Othering certain music as nonmusical and marginalized vocality denied legibility by hegemonic musical norms. Alongside these reflections on the cultural politics of jazz voice, the reader is guided through explorations of the scat existing before scat; the less-celebrated recordings of the most-celebrated scat singer, Ella Fitzgerald; and the ways scat’s meanings are reshaped by poetry and by lesser-known singers of the past and present.

With Langston Hughes as tour guide, this chapter sounds the (ostensible) paradox of jazz abroad: on one hand, jazz has often been perceived as indubitably, authentically “Black,” a racially encoded expression. On the other hand, jazz’s inherent multivalences oscillate on transnational frequencies that have resonated and continue to resonate with all kinds of people all over the world. The story of jazz abroad, then, is also the story of Blackness on the move, a journey perpetually navigating a course between authenticity and hybridity, individuation and polyvocality, originality and imitation. This jazz dialectic amplifies Blackness as a floating signifier and allows for the performance of fluid, transnational identities that defy homogenizing taxonomies of race, class, culture, or nationhood. And so, jazz– and jazz abroad especially– is (paradoxically) both, a distinctly Black American art form, and at the same time world music long before we had a term for it.

This chapter examines relationships between documentary screen-media and jazz from the 1950s to today. As a mode of production which often lays claim to “truth” and “reality,” documentary’s reflexive relationship with jazz is interrogated for its enduring power to keenly shape ideas about both jazz and documentary itself. Concert-films, meta-narrative documentaries, and biographical film are introduced as key repositories of jazz culture that reflect and codify jazz history and meaning. The use of jazz in nonjazz documentaries is also explored as an example of jazz’s integration into screen-media’s cultural vernacular and the aesthetics of the everyday. Throughout the chapter, attention is given to examples in which ideas about jazz and US democracy are propagated through documentary film practice, reception, and aesthetics.